Colour on Ancient Marble Sculpture

1 Detail of the painted Prima Porta Augustus. Photo: Wolfram Martini, with permission from Munich

Staatliche Antikensammlung und Glyptothek.

I M P O R TA N C E O F C O L O U R O N A N C I E N T M A R B L E S C U L P T U R E

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THE IMPORTANCE OF COLOUR ON ANCIENT

MARBLE SCULPTURE

M A R K B R A D L E Y

When the white marble head of an Amazon was discovered at Herculaneum inMarch 2006 with delicate colours clearly preserved on the hair, eyes and eyela-shes, the news came as little surprise to the world of archaeology and art history(plate 2). Several venues around Europe, including museums in Munich, Romeand Copenhagen, had already hosted a bold and striking exhibition of paintedGreco-Roman casts, sometimes set alongside their white marble originals,representing not an arbitrary reconstructive imagination but many years ofintensive scientific and archaeological research. Following more than twohundred years of research into painted marble, museums are now highly cautiousabout cleaning the surfaces of their sculpture collections, and most seriousreconstructions of Greco-Roman architecture and sculpture are prepared tointegrate elements alongside their gleaming white marbles. Nevertheless,the colourful discovery at Herculaneum was reported in several mainstreamEuropean newspapers, demonstrating the enduring potential for paint on clas-sical sculpture to surprise or shock the public, and the continuing need to inte-grate colour properly into the classical aesthetic. Winckelmann’s long-liveddogma about pure white classical art still has its supporters.1

And yet, while most discussions include a stock footnote to the effect thatancient sculpture was coloured, paint is seldom taken into account in art-historical studies of ancient marble sculpture.2 In spite of the striking aestheticdifferences between the original Prima Porta statue of Augustus and its paintedreconstruction (plates 3 and 4; see also plate 1), for example, the significance of itscolours has still not been integrated into serious discussions of its art-historicalimportance or its artistic composition. The choice of marble for ancient sculptureand the ramifications of the stone’s natural colour have received some attention,but the difference that the application of coloured coatings might have made toindividual pieces remains on the whole underexplored.3 This is partly a result ofthe disappearance of paint traces from the majority of surviving pieces ofsculpture, and partly to the degree of guesswork involved in reconstructing theoriginal state of pieces even where some traces remain. However, recent work byVinzenz Brinkmann and other archaeologists and art historians in Europe hasdrawn attention back to the importance of colour on ancient sculpture, as well asthe possibilities granted by new scientific methods for more accurate and

DOI:10.1111/j.1467-8365.2009.00666.xART HISTORY . ISSN 0141–6790 . VOL 32 NO 3 . JUNE 2009 pp 427-457& Association of Art Historians 2009. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 4279600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

complete reconstructions than werepreviously thought possible. Through theuse of ultraviolet fluorescence and infraredreflection and raking light, paint traceslargely invisible to the naked eye (and the‘ghosts’ left by paint traces on the stone)can be detected. Furthermore, electronicdatabases allow us to detect patterns in theuse of pigments on different sculpturaltypes and decorative features.4 We are nowin a stronger position than ever before toenrich our appreciation and under-standing of ancient sculptural polychromy.

This paper aims to complement thepioneering technical and reconstructivework that has recently been carried outby approaching the subject from theperspective of the cultural history of colourand perception in the ancient world.Although it will review material and find-ings from Archaic and Classical Greek andHellenistic periods, this study will concen-trate on the art and literature of imperialRome, which at the present time is under-represented in this field.5 The recentexhibitions of painted Greek and Romancasts at more than ten internationalvenues and the publication of Brinkmann’skey study Die Polychromie der archaischen undfr.uhklassischen Skulptur (2003) make this anopportune moment to review the question

of what difference it makes to think of ancient sculpture in colour rather than inmonochrome. How does colour alter the visual dynamics of the Parthenon frieze?What does a painted Prima Porta Augustus achieve that a white version does not? IfTrajan’s column was painted, does that change the way it was viewed? How does (orhow should) colour transform our aesthetic of ancient art?

Answers to these challenging questions can be reached by integrating theprinciples of pigment distribution (which colours are used to define whichfeatures?) and literary ekphrasis (how does an ancient viewer describe a paintedobject?). This article will first review some of the most significant pieces ofsculpture on which significant paint traces have survived, and consider in indi-vidual cases the basic functions of coloured coatings and patinas. By integratingvisual material with literary evidence, it will then assess the significance ofsculptural polychromy under four headings: visibility, finish, realism and trompe-l’oeil. Finally, as a ‘pilot’ for the application of these interpretative guidelines to asingle piece of ancient sculpture, the article will revisit the Prima Porta Augustusand consider some of the ways in which polychromy can enrich our under-standing and interpretation of this key piece of Roman art.

2 Head of an Amazon, from a life-size statue

discovered near the Nonius Balbus Basilica

at Herculaneum, c. CE 60. Marble. Hercula-

neum: Antiquarium, SAP 8702. Photo:

Riccardo Giordano/ Herculaneum Conser-

vation Project. Published with the kind

permission of the Soprintendenza Speciale

per i Beni Culturali di Napoli e Pompei -

Ministero per i Beni e le Attivita Culturali.

T H E I M P O R TA N C E O F C O L O U R O N A N C I E N T M A R B L E S C U L P T U R E

428 & ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2009

A R C HA E O L O G I C A L E V I D E N C EPainted marble is a controversial subject which has elicited little agreement sinceit was first raised in the early nineteenth century. It is now generally acceptedthat most – and perhaps all – Greco-Roman marble sculpture and architecture(like its Egyptian and Near-Eastern counterparts) received some form of supple-mentary coating to modify and enhance its surfaces, which also manipulated thecolour.6 This surface treatment is now recognized to be integral to the overalleffect of the sculpture. In particular, it has been observed that the draped parts ofstatues, their eyes, eyelashes, lips, hair and accessories received coats of colour,and it is likely that the remaining areas were also treated so that the appearanceof the stone was modified.7 The backgrounds of grave reliefs and architecturalfriezes were normally brightly coloured, and details in the foreground werefrequently picked out with colour and metal attachments.8 Evidence of thegilding of specific features of marble sculpture, both statuary and relief sculp-ture, to produce the effect of metal accoutrements as well as to distinguishcertain features of heroic figures survives from as early as the fifth century BCEthrough to the end of antiquity.9 In addition to gilding, there is widespreadevidence for the completion of marble sculpture with features in bronze, lead,stucco or wooden accessories: weapons, armour, sceptres, hair, beards andjewellery in these materials were added to a wide range of sculpture from all

3 (left) The Prima Porta statue of Augustus, c. CE 15. Parian marble, height 204 cm. Rome: Vatican

Museums (inv. 2290). Photo: Vatican Museums.

4 (right) The painted plaster reconstruction of the Prima Porta statue of Augustus, 2002–3. Rome:

Vatican Museums (inv. 36858). Photo: Vatican Museums.


429& ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2009

periods. Eyes were normally painted directly on to the marble, but they could alsobe inlaid using enamel, ivory, glass, coloured marbles or gems, sometimes kept inplace with bronze eyelashes.10 Early imperial Rome also saw the proliferation ofcomplex and sophisticated combinations of polychrome marbles in order toproduce realistic coloristic effects, with white marbles used to render skin, darkerstones for the hair and textured marbles for the clothes: even for these pieces, oneshould probably expect further embellishment by means of coatings and patinasfor the skin and paint for the lips and eyes.11 Nor did applications of coloursimply modify carved details already marked out on the stone: often paint alonewas employed to render and differentiate detail on smooth surfaces.12

Marble was symptomatic of a wide range of sculptural materials that weretreated and embellished to produce subtle and realistic effects of colour. Thesurfaces of sculpture in limestone, sandstone or porous volcanic stones were oftencovered with plaster or stucco, and it is generally accepted that these coveringswere painted in their entirety.13 Terracotta sculpture was also intricately painted,its pigments often better preserved than marble sculpture owing to its poroussurfaces and the context in which it was normally kept.14 In addition, thesurfaces of bronze statuary were regularly variegated or coloured with differentalloys, inlaid or brightly painted eyes, silver-plated teeth and fingernails, darkenedhair and other features, and were sometimes gilded or coated with variouspatinas and pigmentations.15 The same was probably also true of the majority ofsculpture in ivory, most notably variegated chryselephantine statuary.16 Itshould be expected that antiquity’s wooden statues, now almost entirely lost

5 Laurence Alma-Tadema, Pheidias and the Frieze of the Parthenon, 1868, showing Pheidias unveiling

the bold colours of the frieze to his (much more subdued and paler-skinned) guests. Oil on

canvas, 72.3 � 109.2 cm. Birmingham: Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery. Photo:

Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery.



to us, were coloured in variousways.17 Furthermore, polychromy– whether produced by combiningstones or metals or by applyingpigments to sculptural surfaces –cut across the full range of sculp-ture types: busts, statues andarchitectural sculpture, as wellas vase reliefs and grave stelai.This was symptomatic of ancientMediterranean art in general:mummy portraits, polychromevases, mosaics and wall-paintings(to give just a few examples) regu-larly deployed rich combinationsof colours. Evidence of colouredsculpture stretches from theseventh century BCE through to atleast the third or fourth centuryCE, and tempera techniques andother forms of pigmentationpersisted in Byzantine, Medievaland Early Modern sculpture.18 Onthe whole, it seems, where therewas form there was colour.

We can no longer accept theabsence of visible paint traces onpieces of marble sculpture asevidence that they were originallymonochrome: it has been amplydemonstrated that excavationmethods, cast modelling, museumhistories, weathering and pigmentdisintegration can account for thenear or complete disappearance ofpigment traces.19 There is now averitable list of celebrated ancientmarble sculptures known to havebeen transformed by coats ofcolour. One of the earliest, andarguably most important, addi-tions to this list was the sculpturalrelief of the Parthenon, the subjectof heated controversy throughoutthe nineteenth century owing to aseries of bold interpretations andgarish reconstructions (plate 5),and in the 1930s for the rigorous

6 Painted plaster reconstruction of the ‘Peplos Kore’,

c. 530 BCE (1975, repainted 1996). Cambridge: The

Museum of Classical Archaeology (inv. 34a). Photo:

The Museum of Classical Archaeology, Cambridge.



cleaning of the residues on the surfaceof the Elgin marbles.20

On firmer ground was evidence ofcolour preserved on the marble koraiand kouroi that idealized Athenianwomanhood and manhood: thesehad long offended modern classicalaesthetics with their brightly paintedbodies, which imitated the decorativeluxury of the East. As examplesof Archaic sculpture, however, theycould be relegated to a pre-classicalpast, before the Greeks had acquiredany ‘classical’ taste. Nevertheless, theimaginative reconstruction of thePeplos Kore in vivid red, blue, greenand white pigments complete withjewellery, head-dress and a meniskos,exhibited in the first section of theMuseum of Classical Archaeology inCambridge since 1979 (plate 6), hasnever failed to provoke a reaction fromvisitors through its contrast to all theother white casts surrounding it.21

Among other important pieces ofArchaic sculpture, the frieze of theSiphnian Treasury at Delphi (c. 525

BCE) retains traces of paint across its surfaces and has been closely studied.22

Other important Greek coloured sculptures, however, were predominantly Clas-sical: in particular, traces of bright colours were noted by the excavators of theTemple of Aphaia at Aigina in 1811, not only on the friezes and pedimentalsculptures, but also on the floor of the cella, the walls, the marble gutters andantefixes and on the roof ridge tiles.23 Striking combinations of abundantmineral pigments have also been identified and documented on the Propylaeaand the Erechtheum on the Athenian Akropolis, the Hephaesteion, the pedi-mental sculptures of the temple of Zeus at Olympia, a wide array of architecturaland statuary sculpture from Magna Graecia, the Great Macedonian tomb atLefkadia, the fourth-century Mausoleum at Halicarnassus and the so-called‘Alexander Sarcophagus’ in the Istanbul Archaeological Museum.24 The latterpiece in particular is thought to mark a period of major change in ancientpolychromy, with a greater focus on realism, subtle pastel colours, and a moresophisticated aesthetic use of the underlying marble25 (plate 7).

Less work has been conducted on Hellenistic and Roman painted sculpture,although brightly coloured human eyes appear to have been the norm, and colourtraces have been identified across a wide range of sculpture types, particularlycult statues, garden sculpture and portraits.26 Of surviving polychrome sculpturefrom Rome, only two pieces have been systematically studied. The most importantis the Parian marble statue of Augustus from Prima Porta, on which extensive

7 Detail from the colour rendering of the

‘Alexander Sarcophagus’, showing sophisticated

and realistic uses of colour to depict the figure

of a Persian fighter. Photo: F. Winter, Der

Alexandersarkophag aus Sidon, 1912, Strassburg.



traces of multiple pigments have been carefully documented and reconstructed,many of which are still visible to the naked eye27 (see plate 3). Another, whichalong with the Prima Porta has been a highlight of the recent exhibitions ofpainted replicas, is the head of Caligula in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek atCopenhagen28 (plate 8). This head retains many pigment traces in the hairlinesand around the eyes, as well as a tempera technique applied to the skin, and wasclearly painted in its entirety. Its painted marble reconstruction (plate 9) exhibitsthe same kinds of mineral pigments that have been identified on the originalpiece and is among the most successful recent attempts to reconstruct sculpturein colour. Its detailed upward-staring eyes, lacquered highlights in the hair, andthe use of black pigmentation to create the impression of depth in between thelocks provide a striking example of the sophistication and realism that may havebeen applied to the process of painting Roman marbles. Roman sculptural reliefhas received even less attention, although paint traces have been identified on theintricate sculptures of Trajan’s column in the Forum of Trajan at Rome, a factorthat may have been instrumental in enhancing the visibility of this celebratedmonument (see below p. 436).29 Tauroctony reliefs from the cult sites of Mithrasalso often retain traces of colour and gilding owing to the stable undergroundconditions in which they have been preserved; these reliefs were colour-coded sothat individual features of the scene’s iconography could be picked out, andMithras’ face was sometimes gilded as he stared back towards the sun (see plate 10).

8 (left) The head of Caligula, c. CE 37–41, photographed in 1957 before it was damaged, showing

clear traces of colour on and around the left eye. Parian marble, height 31 cm. Copenhagen: Ny

Carlsberg Glyptotek (inv. 2687). Photo: Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen.

9 (right) The first of two painted reconstructions (‘Caligula A’) of the head of Caligula, 2003.

Copenhagen: Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek (inv. 2687a). Photo: Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen.



Much more work on pigment identification and reconstruction, particularlyfor Roman sculpture, remains to be carried out. Countless pieces retain traces ofpigments, ‘ghosts’ left on the surface of the stone by the pigments, and tell-talerasp marks, and the technology is at hand to undertake comprehensive surveys;unfortunately, pigment traces on sculpture are deteriorating rapidly every day,and there is an urgent need to collect data while it is still available. Researchprojects around the globe are confronting this challenge: besides the collabora-tive efforts of Munich, Rome and Copenhagen for the recent exhibitions, theLouvre has conducted important work on its collection of Hellenistic funerarystelai, and the British Museum is undertaking a project to produce a ‘virtualParthenon’ in full colour.30 In New York, Mark B. Abbe is leading importantresearch into painted and gilded marble sculpture at Aphrodisias, and inCopenhagen Jan Østergaard, Curator of Ancient Art at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek,has established the interdisciplinary ‘Copenhagen Polychromy Network Project’(2008–10) in order to analyse a representative selection of classical sculptures inthe Glyptotek with a view to identifying pigment traces and attempting recon-structive work.31 The findings of all this research look set to dramatically increaseour knowledge and understanding of the range, methods and problems ofsculptural polychromy.

V I S I B I L I T YOne aesthetic compromise that is sometimes reached by those less willing toaccept the polychromy of classical sculpture is that marbles were coloured with

10 Mid-third-century CE relief depicting Mithras Tauroctonos (the Bull-Slayer) with gilded face as

he stares back towards the Sun, with polychrome features clearly preserved in the scene around

him. Marble, 90.5 � 148 cm. Rome: Terme di Diocleziano, Museo Nazionale Romano. Photo:

Terme di Diocleziano, Museo Nazionale Romano, Rome, inv. 205837.



subtle and muted pigments –and indeed there is someevidence that Classical Greek,Hellenistic and Roman sculp-ture may have been coloured inincreasingly sophisticated ways(discussed below).32 However,one important function ofsculptural polychromy that haslong been acknowledged, andwhich has in particular beenforegrounded by Brinkmann inhis study of Archaic sculpture,is that the bold, intensemineral pigments used were ameans of enhancing visibility,strengthening legibility anddistinguishing heroic or divinefigures.33 The early fifth-century BCE figure of thearcher (identified as Paris) fromthe pediment of the temple ofAphaia at Aegina – one of thehighlights of Brinkmann’sreconstructive work – wasbrightly painted precisely sothat it could be picked outfrom a distance against theblue background of the pedi-ment, and not at eye level as itwas presented in recent exhi-bitions34 (plate 11). The pedi-ment sculptures of the templeof Zeus at Olympia werealso vividly painted to increasetheir visibility.35 Black under-coating detected between theridges of drapery on theParthenon sculptures produceda three-dimensional effect, andcontrasting hues may also havehelped viewers to distinguishoverlapping horses on thenorth and south sides of thefrieze.36 It has also beenobserved that pedimentalsculptures on tall buildingswere coloured more brightly

11 Painted model of the archer from the west pediment

of the Temple of Aphaia at Aegina, inserted into its

pedimental context in order to demonstrate the impor-

tance of colour and colour contrast for visibility.

Munich: Staatliche Antikensammlung und Glyptothek.

Photo: Vinzenz Brinkmann.



than those on low buildings, and that vividly coloured backgrounds helpedviewers to pick out the figures.37 Colour must have been critical to monumentssuch as Trajan’s column, where distinctive features (such as the emperor inpurple) could be highlighted and artistic detail appreciated by viewers standingsome twenty feet or further away. Paint offers one solution to the perennialproblem of how viewers could pick out the intricate sculpted detail of suchmonuments.

One effect of using bold colours to enhance visibility, it has been argued, isthat the sculptures may have appeared super-natural: they were painted ‘not inimitation of, but by analogy with nature, the colours bolder and simpler’.38 At adistance, however, bright colours do not necessarily make the subject seemunrealistic; viewed at close proximity, bold pigments professionally applied topieces such as the Prima Porta Augustus and the Copenhagen Caligula catch theattention and make the sacred and the powerful stand out.39 This key idea, andits connection with Roman heroic statuary, was memorably captured by Virgil inthe first book of the Aeneid, when Venus finally reveals her son Aeneas to theCarthaginian queen with a view to captivating her with his statuesque beauty:

He [Achates] had scarcely finished speaking, when suddenly the enveloping cloud parted and

vanished into thin air. Aeneas stood there and gleamed in the bright light (claraque

in luce refulsit), like a god in his face and shoulders; for his mother herself had breathed the

purple glow (purpureum lumen) of youth into her son’s distinguished locks and a pleasant spark

(laetos honores) into his eyes – just as hands add distinction (decus) to ivory, or when silver or

Parian marble is laced with yellow gold.40

Aeneas, at least in this divinely enhanced manifestation, appears both super-human and statuesque: Virgil exploits both the metaphors of heroic statuary andof divine lustre in order to convey his appearance and his impression on thequeen.41 The poet’s language captures the effects of clarity and luminosity (clar-aque in luce refulsit . . . lumen purpureum . . . laetos honores . . . decus) and then comparesAeneas to a chryselephantine or Parian marble statue, its surfaces embellished byartistic expertise just as Aeneas’ striking figure is evoked by Virgilian ekphrasis.The human form provides only the raw material; artistic skill provides thefinishing touches – sea-purple dye on ivory or gilded decoration on marble.Elsewhere in the Aeneid, figures that dazzle and captivate characters with theirappearance are likened to statues: in particular, the blushing Lavinia, who saysnot a word in the poem but through her beauty alone enraptures the Italianprince Turnus and thereby crafts his doom, is also compared to an ivory sculpturedyed with purple (12.64–69). The heroic statue, then, was set up both as thepassive spectacle that drew the viewer to it, and as an active protagonist thatmade an impact on the viewer’s world: the striking use of colour, it appears, was akey medium through which this impact could be made.

F I N I S HColour ‘finishes’ off a piece of sculpture. It endows a further, final layer ofmeaning to the form of the sculpture, and allows the various characteristics ofthe marble to be developed and expressed with greater sophistication. This is theemphasis placed by most of the literary evidence that survives for the use of



colour on ancient statuary. In a play distinguished by its subtle use of sculptureimagery and the blurring of boundaries between image and reality, Euripides’Helen bewails her legendary beauty, and wishes she had been wiped clean as ifshe were a statue (exaleiphtheis’hos agalma), and made plain instead of beautiful:the Euripidean metaphor suggests a figure in the round that had been embel-lished and given character by a layer of colour, and whose surface appearancecould be whitewashed and repainted less beautifully.42 In a similar vein, thesecond-century polymath Lucian provides a good example of what, from oneancient perspective, colour can do for a work of art. The essential interactionbetween form, material and colour (and the role of colour in disguising materi-ality) is neatly demonstrated by this discussion of the final stages in thepreparation of the ‘ideal’ statue. Here, Lucian’s statue is complete, all except forthe finish (Imagines 7–8):

[This final ingredient is] not the most unimportant, my friend, unless you will maintain

that perfection of form is but little enhanced by its skin (chroa) and appropriateness in each

detail, so that precisely those parts will be dark that should be dark, and those bright which

should be, and the blush will bloom upon the surface and so forth. I fear we will stand in

need of the most important feature! . . . let Polygnotos do the becomingness of her brows

and the blush of her cheeks . . . and let him also render her clothing to the most delicate

texture . . . the rest of the body let Apelles represent . . . not too white but just diffused with

blood . . . let her be throughout of a colour like that which Homer gave to the thighs of

Menelaos when he likened them to ivory tinged with purple and let him also paint (grapsato)

the eyes and make her ‘ox-eyed’. The Theban poet [Pindar], too, shall lend him a hand in the

work, to give her ‘violet brows’. Yes, and Homer shall make her ‘laughter-loving’ and ‘bright-

armed’ and ‘rosy-fingered’ . . .

Lucian’s Imagines playfully explores the dialogic relationship between sculptureand poetic ekphrasis.43 In this excerpt, the speaker Polystratus points out that astatue and any claims to poetic expression are unfinished unless chroa – a skin orlayer – is applied. This ‘skin’ mediates the capacity of the stone to reproduce thefigure the sculptor is imitating. That this ‘finish’ is a delicate and subtle process,designed to bring the work of art to life, is paraded by Lucian’s exploitation of thecolour cliches of Greek verse: ‘becomingness’, ‘faint flush’, ‘delicate texture’, faintdiffusion of blood, the crimsoned ivory legs of Menelaos, ‘ox-eyes’, violet brows,and so on, toy with concepts of colour rooted not only in other areas of sensationand objects, but also in other literary and artistic traditions. All these finishingtouches that enrich the meaning of the subject matter are dependent on theapplication of colour. An ancient statue without colour, then, is like a mannequinwithout clothes.44

One further aspect of the use of colour as a finish for sculpture is that it givesthe subject matter another interpretative layer for the art historian to consider. Inparticular, it allows the artist – and the viewer – to distinguish particular featuresof the image that lend the subject matter definition and distinction. In Eclogue 7,Virgil has a character promise a statue to Diana made out of polished marble (leuide marmore), her ankles bound with scarlet (punicei) buskins: here, the colourmarks a special and defining honour for the statue’s dedication. In the Catalepton,the poet promises Venus, if she will let him finish his Trojan epic not just incense



and a painted tablet (picta tabella) to decorate her temple, but also a marble statueof a winged Cupid, his quiver painted, as is the custom, with wings of a thousandcolours (mille colores); this suggests that there were typologies of paint appropriatefor individual subjects.45 Furthermore, some of the pigments that were regularlyused on high-grade sculpture (malachite, azurite, cinnabar, Egyptian blue)were worth their weight in gold and it is likely that connoisseurs would betrained to identify and appreciate the cost and value of certain pigments thatwere used, just as they were trained to recognize the material out of which thesculpture was carved.46

There is some reason to believe, at least for the most important and expensiveworks of sculpture, that a separate professional was commissioned to ‘finish’ offwhat the sculptor had started, once the sculpture had been set up in position.47

In a frequently cited passage of book 35 of the Natural History, Pliny the Elderdiscusses the aesthetic tastes of the sculptor Praxiteles who, when asked whichmarble works he thought most highly of, replied those that the painter Nicias hadworked on, since he valued the process of applying paint (circumlitio) to statues sohighly.48 Plutarch, in his treatise On the glory of the Athenians, compares tragicactors to the painters, gilders and dyers of statues; like these, tragic actors put thefinishing touches to the plays they perform.49 There is some evidence thatprofessionals called ‘polishers’ (Latin politores) existed, who developed sophisti-cated methods to achieve subtle finishes for gems, ivories and marbles.50 Indeed‘polishing’ provided a convenient classical metaphor for finishing and refiningdiverse features of ancient life: agriculture, clothes, speech, literature, moralstature and physical appearance, as well as works of art, were all ‘polished’ inorder to achieve refinement and perfection.51 The application of colour to marblesculpture, then, was an integral part of the finishing process. The adjective‘marble’ (marmareos/marmoreus) described not a raw lump of rock, but a shaped,crafted, polished work of art.52 Part of a sculptural ‘polish’ might also includepreservative coatings applied to the marble, as well as varnishes, patinas, glazes,colour sheens, highlights and metal attachments. Furthermore, we should expectthat many sculptures were periodically restored and repainted in order to restorecolours that had faded or been damaged, and it is by no means certain that theywere always restored in the same way.53

Indeed, there is probably very little to tell between the various coats of polishand coats of paint on Roman marble. Across antiquity, marble surfaces wereartificially enhanced by a process called ganosis, in which a layer of melted waxmixed with olive oil was applied, which both protected the underlying marbleand enhanced the brilliance of painted surfaces.54 It seems likely that ganosis wasapplied to sculptural surfaces on a regular (in some cases annual) basis, and it wasprobably a standard part of restoration projects.55 Ganosis was perhaps one of anumber of available surface treatments which modified the appearance ofunderlying colours. Pliny describes Apelles’ use of atramentum (35.97) as a finishfor his paintings, a dark preservative/varnish applied so thinly that it threw upthe brilliance of all the colours (claritates colorum omnium excitaret) while toningdown and giving ‘sombreness’ (austeritas) to those that were too garish (floridi): theeffect, he adds, was similar to that of looking through tinted glass (lapis spec-ularis).56 ‘Finishing’ the artistic medium, then, was a highly complex technicalprocess which highlighted and enhanced the underlying material.



What is needed, then, is a moresophisticated understanding of the rela-tionship between ‘colour’ and ‘material’:one must avoid the assumption thatcolour was applied in a way that disre-garded the underlying material.57 Thesophisticated polishes and patinas docu-mented in contemporary literature andepigraphy, and the complex minerallayers identified on certain pieces ofsculpture, should be considered asevidence for a more nuanced use ofpolychromy on classical sculpture than issometimes suggested by modern recon-structions. The Prima Porta Augustus,unlike its painted plaster cast, was carvedout of an expensive block of Parian lych-nites, and must have integrated coloursinto its translucent surfaces so that themarble’s special properties were comple-mented by the pigments that brought it‘to life’ (see below pp. 447–50). AlthoughCarrara rather than Parian, the paintedmarble replica of the Ny Carlsberg Glyp-totek Caligula (see plate 9) is moresuccessful in this respect. The refractionof light entering through the paint layerfrom the crystalline structures of themarble has a significant effect on theclarity and depth of the colours, so thatthe pigments do not merely sit on thesurface of the sculpture. Furthermore,some pigments – such as cinnabar –penetrate the surface of the marble, sothat they sit in the stone rather than onit: this may have served, for example, to‘suffuse’ a skin pigment laid on thesurface of the cheeks in a highly subtle and realistic way. Surface finishing mayhave further enriched this effect: in particular, the ‘encaustic’ technique (that ofapplying colour mixed with hot wax to a polished surface) served to preserve andenhance the translucent quality of the marble.58 However, still very little isknown about the nature of ancient expertise in painting sculpture (unlikeexpertise in marble sculpting), and it is perhaps to the fine but imaginativereconstructions of the nineteenth century that we must turn to best visualize thepotential for the professional deployment of coloured finishes on marble statuary.John Gibson, whose celebrated Tinted Venus (plate 12) caused a sensation when itwas displayed at the London International Exhibition of 1862 for its strikinglyrealistic nudity, defended his decision to colour his piece with the argument that

12 J. Gibson, Tinted Venus, 1851–1856. Marble,

height 175 cm. The skin is lightly tinted to

give warmth to the marble, and the eyes,

hair, apple, tortoise and hem of the robe are

fully coloured. Liverpool: Walker Art Gallery

(inv. WAG7808). Photo: National Museums

Liverpool.



‘a cold white statue would . . . have appeared incomplete to that people [theGreeks]’.59

R E A L I S MViewers in the modern West are conditioned both to expect and to acceptmonochrome marble figures with white hair, white skin and white eyeballs.This is – in part – a consequence of neo-classical aesthetics: some of the mosticonic and memorable items of post-medieval sculpture display unblemishedwhite marble surfaces.60 And yet this is an artistic aesthetic that (at face value)is categorically abstract and incongruous with the principles of classical realism.A monochrome marble figure fractures the fundamental relationship betweenart and reality: a white statue of Augustus does not populate the world ofthe living.

Colour, then, circumvents this problem. Colour provides the finish thatbrings the sculpture to life, that produces – as they could sometimes be describedin a range of ancient discourses – ‘living images’ on the ambiguous line betweenthe real and the imaginary (Greek zoa or Latin spirantia signa, to take twosuggestive categories).61 Public statues ‘intermingled’ with the world of theliving, and painted relief sculpture could be seen to recreate mythic scenesthat were so lifelike that viewers believed they had really happened.62 In the thirdor fourth century CE, Kallistratos described the preparation of a Parian marblestatue of a Maenad in such a way as to render it almost alive and depart fromthe law (nomos) that normally governs stone: ‘what one saw was really an image,but art (techne) carried imitation (mimesis) over into reality’.63 This idea had alsobeen explored by Plato: a section of the Republic comparing the correctly paintedstatue to the correctly organized state draws attention to the role of colour inachieving mimesis:

It is as if someone were to approach us as we were painting a statue and criticize us, saying that

we did not apply the most beautiful pigments to the most beautiful parts of the image. For the

eyes, which are the most beautiful part have not been painted with purple but with black. We

should reasonably reply to him, ‘My dear friend, do not expect us to paint the eyes so fine that

they will not be like eyes at all, nor the other parts, but observe whether or not by assigning

what is appropriate (ta prosekonta) to each part, we make the whole beautiful’.64

Ancient discussions of art tended to lay great emphasis on the controlled andsober use of ‘correct’ pigments for imitation and representation.65 For contem-porary philosophers, paints were artificial surfaces and therefore any connectionwith the underlying object was arbitrary; the sheer diversity of artificial paints,pigments and dyes exacerbated this difficulty, and the threat it posed to therelationship between perception and understanding. Artistic and poetic colourswere sometimes considered incompatible: qualities of colour in Greek verse suchas ‘rosy-fingered’ (rhododaktulos), for example, could hardly be reproduced by thepainter using ‘rose dye’ (rhodeon chroma).66 One solution to the logical problemposed by paints was to aim to use the ‘correct’ colour (so, in crude terms, make art‘veristic’). Thus Plato’s analogy between the painting of a statue and the organi-zation of the state draws attention to the importance of applying the correctcolours to the correct parts of the image.67 The accurate alignment of artistic



colours with the categories of poeticekphrasis was also a central concernof Lucian’s account of the painting ofthe ‘ideal statue’ at Imagines 7–8(above p. 437). This emphasis onusing the proper colours in art, onimitating, copying and reproducingvisible physical objects, goes someway to explaining the intensity of theGreco-Roman debate on mixing andon using pure colours.68 This is one ofthe reasons why the simple four-colour palette (connected by some tothe elemental tetrads of early Greekphilosophy or the four humours ofHippocratic medicine) was so warmlyembraced by a range of ancient moraland philosophical writers, withsimple colours and colour-mixturescorresponding straightforwardly andaccurately to the objects that werebeing represented.69 The artist was an‘imitator’ (mimetes), and his objectivewas to replicate a head, eyes, hair,tunic, weapons using appropriate andrealistic colours.

Great effort was applied to correlating appropriate colours with the subjectmatter of the sculpture. The marble statue of ‘Venus in Bikini’ from Pompeiishows the goddess, her pale skin represented by the largely unpainted whitemarble, with jewellery and skimpy accoutrements represented by gilding andmetal ornamentation applied directly on to the marble.70 Silver alloys could beused to evoke the pallid flesh of female subjects or figures that were dying, andbronze was regularly used to render the tanned flesh of nude gods, athletes orwarriors.71 The first-century BCE bronze seated boxer at the Museo NazionaleRomano (inv. 1055) has copper inlays inserted into grooves and channels across hisbody, reproducing dripping blood and bruising after his fight.72 Indeed, recentscholarship has drawn attention to the realism and sophistication of chromaticvariegation in bronze statuary (plate 13), as well as its evaluation in classicalekphrasis.73

This emphasis on the accurate representation of life pervades a wide rangeof classical art. Pliny the Elder comments (Natural History 35.4) that the paintingof portraits (imaginum pictura) was the traditional means by which Roman artcould transmit through the ages the closest likenesses of people’s faces, althoughhe complains that this practice had by his time died out so that imagineshad become homogenized and stereotyped. The use of clay models some-times attested in the production of sculpture (including the technique of‘casting from life’), as well as the ancestral portraits that lined the atrium ofaristocratic Roman houses, point to the importance of preserving precise features

13 Reconstruction of the bronze head of a boy

with a victor’s fillet, c. CE 20. Munich: Staatliche

Antikensammlung und Glyptothek (inv. 457).

Photo: Renate K .uhling.



in representations.74 Painted masks were also used in ancient theatre, theircolours rigidly schematized so that particular character-types possessed the facialcolours that typically defined them (red-haired barbarian slave, pale noblewoman,tanned peasant, etc.).75 This principle of colour-coding to reproduce (and rein-force) a stereotyped reality is a defining characteristic of many items of paintedmarble sculpture: tanned warriors, pale females, red-haired barbarians, andso on.76

This argument that sculptural colours were ‘coded’ to represent reality (or atleast a version of reality) is quite different from that adopted by Elena Walter-Karydi that coloristic effects were what really mattered in painting sculpture.77

It also differs from Valentina Manzelli’s argument (rooted in various strandsof anthropological enquiry) that seeks layers of ‘colour symbolism’ in the choiceof colours: black/blue as a celestial and male colour versus red as a chthonic andfemale colour, for example.78 ‘Colour symbolism’ implies that colours exist intheir own right, independently of the objects which they qualify. An interpreta-tion of sculptural polychromy in which colour is an extension of the underlyingform, on the other hand, highlights the use of colour to qualify, identifyand enrich the subject to which it is applied. This is not to say that sculpturalcolour straightforwardly reproduces reality: bold, super-natural colours couldunderwrite the ambiguity often inherent to representations of the human formin-the-round, an interpretation persuasively applied by Richard Gordon to Greco-Roman sculpture.79

The use of colour as a tool for artistic mimesis provides one explanation forthe relative paucity of literary evidence on the practice. It was not the norm, wemust assume, to talk about the painting of sculpture as if it were a separate andspecial part of the production process. Literary references were made tooutstanding features of colour (Diana’s scarlet buskins, for example, or Cupid’sthousand-coloured quiver), special uses of pigments, or to an artist’s unusualattention to this particular aspect of sculpting (Pliny on Praxiteles), but thecustomary colouring of sculptural features rarely elicited comment. Further-more, there was no straightforward chromatic register available with which todescribe painted surfaces (there was no Greek or Latin equivalent to ‘pink’, ‘red’,‘brown’, etc.). Ancient thinkers (and particularly those concerned with optics)generally considered colour (chroma or color) to be the primary object of sight,formulated as the surface (or ‘what is visible’) of an object, rather than a separateentity that existed in its own right.80 Mimesis, then, was an intrinsic concern inthe production of classical art, and the idea that every object should have itsproper, telltale colour was an axiom of ancient thought.

T R O M P E - L’ O E I LA classical landscape of painted statues probably had more in common with awaxworks museum than the high art of a modern cast gallery. Indeed, theaesthetic of trompe-l’oeil (‘trick of the eye’) – whereby the object representedparticipates in the world occupied by the viewer – is one logical consequence ofartistic mimesis, and one for which the use of colour, and all the various surfacesand attachments outlined above, was integral. Colour, therefore, disguised themateriality of the sculpture and by doing so obscured the line between art andreality. The result was a second population within the ancient city, intermingling



with the living and sharing their iconography, values and history. The possibi-lities, uncertainties and discomfort generated by this ambiguity between art andlife provided a fertile ground for exploration in a wide range of artistic andliterary discourses.81

Representations of sculpture in ancient painting, and particularly the richwall-paintings of Pompeii and other key Roman sites, offer a rich source ofinformation about the appearance, context and distribution of ancient sculp-ture.82 And yet, it can sometimes be very difficult to distinguish a statue from aliving figure in an ancient artistic representation. A small handful of examplescan be cited which unambiguously appear to depict statues, either becauseof their position in the scene, or because a statue is in the process of beingcompleted, or because it exhibits characteristics that are ‘statuesque’, such as astatue base, miniature dimensions, stiff pose or manifestly material features.On the whole, however, images of classical statues tended to force the viewer toquestion whether the figure was real or artificial. The ambiguous representationof figures was in fact a primary motif in all styles of Pompeian wall-painting;plate 14 shows a female painter, herself a figure in a framed painting, comparinga painted statue – perhaps Priapus – to a framed painting at her feet (whichof the two she is about to paint is left deliberately unclear). Ambiguous figuralart was a particular characteristic of garden-paintings, in which paintedstatues stared back as if they might at any moment spring to life.83 The degree towhich statues in these paintings faithfully reproduce the appearance, positionand reception of real statues is the subject of some debate, although it must betaken as axiomatic that the painters were exploiting and parading an existingsculptural aesthetic that challenged the division between art and life.84 To acertain extent, these representations belonged to the provocative realm of illu-sionism in which the artist could deploy and explore creative uses of stance,weight, material and colour.

Take, for example, the painting of the statue of Mars in the House ofVenus Marina at Pompeii (see plate 15).85 This armed figure, nude apart from ared cloak that hangs down his back, is predominantly white (presumably anindication of the marble out of which the statue is carved), although the featuresof his face are painted. With the skin coloration and the pedestal, he is clearlyintended to look like a real garden statue, and yet his helmet plume is organicand unstatuesque, and the figure stands in contrapposto, tilting to its right sofar without props or struts that a real stone statue could not stand upright.86

By merging the statuesque and the lifelike in this way, then, the painterpresented a playful and provocative interplay of art and life. Another example ofsuch representational ambiguity is the six ‘pilaster’-herms of satyrs and maenadsthat form part of the painted architecture in the House of the Cryptoporticus(VI.17.42): statuesque as they are, rooted fast in their architectural scaffolding,the delicately painted faces with their wispy realistic hair stare out at the vieweras if they were living.87 Indeed, Campanian art is rife with ambiguous repre-sentations of statuesque figures. Of course, in order to evoke this ambiguitybetween art and life, the painter needed to capture elements of the statuesque asmuch as he used the palette to bring his figures to life.88 It is not enough simplyto say that the painted statue imitated (and interchanged with) reality: themateriality of art constituted a visual discourse in itself, and the theme of the



14 Wall-painting from the House of the Surgeon, Pompeii VI.1.10, showing

a female painter observing a framed painting and a painted statue (c. CE

55–79). Naples: Museo Archeologico Nazionale (inv. 9018). Photo: Soprain-

tendenza Archeologica di Pompeii.

15 Detail of wall-painting showing Statue of Mars in the House of Venus

Marina at Pompeii (II.3.3). Photo: Soprintendenza Archeologica di Pompeii.



fantastical that transcended both artand reality was a familiar playingfield in the domain of wall-painting.89

One specific context in whichsculpture functioned explicitly asa substitute for the real thing, andtherefore in which ambiguities be-tween art and reality had a highlyfertile ground for formation andexploitation, was the representationof cult statues.90 Statues of divinitieswere erected inside shrines andtemples both embodying and stand-ing in proxy for the gods who weresupposed to live there, and it is unsur-prising to find that literary accountsfrequently elide the distinction be-tween deity and image of deity, andvisual representations of cult statueswithin sacred buildings (on coins,vases and wall-paintings, for example)creatively exploit these ambiguities.91

It is sometimes difficult to decidewhether it is the statue that is beingdescribed or depicted, or the divinityitself. In some representations, thisvery difficulty of distinguishing artfrom reality is playfully explored andparaded by the image: a well-knownfourth-century BCE Apulian column-krater (plate 16) depicts an artist painting the lion-skin of an unpainted statue ofHeracles while the real Heracles looks on, inviting an expectation that the statuewill be identical to the hero himself when the painter has completed his task.92

Once a cult statue is painted, clothed, armed and garlanded, it creates theimpression of the real god or hero standing around in the city and participating inhuman life. At the same time, such representations could never be straightfor-wardly ‘naturalistic’: gods and heroes existed in the ancient mind as figures bothreminiscent of mortals and at the same time fundamentally distinct from them.They were often larger-than-life and exhibited certain characteristics that onemight term ‘unnaturalistic’: bold intense colours, for example, or a radiant glowproduced by reflective materials like gold, marble and ivory and manipulated byreflective pools, polished floors, or lighting and shadow inside temples.93 In addi-tion, an interpretation of sculptural polychromy based on ‘realism’ need not bestatic, reductivist or unilinear: one must accept that meaning was born out of adialogue between object and viewer and that multiple interpretations werepossible.94

This playful (and sometimes provocative) oscillation between the sculptureand the living figure represented by the sculpture was a well-established literary

16 Apulian terracotta column-krater (bowl for

mixing wine and water), c. 360–350 BCE, showing

an artist painting a lion-skin on a marble statue

of Heracles. One of his assistants is heating a

charcoal brazier, suggesting the use of the

encaustic technique. New York: Metropolitan

Museum of Art (Rogers Fund, 1950 (50.11.4)).

Photo: r Metropolitan Museum of Art.



topos, and the notion that a master sculptor could bring his subject literallyto life was a familiar motif in the classical imagination. Hephaestus andDaedalus created figures out of clay and metal with such skill that they cameto life, mythological prototypes for a long list of Greco-Roman stories about‘living statues’.95 The eroticism of classical sculpture is a familiar playing-fieldfor art-historical discussion: the phenomenon of ‘agalmatophilia’ is most evoca-tively represented by the story of the Cypriot sculptor Pygmalion, who fallsin love with an ivory statue he has made, and after prayers to Aphroditethe statue turns to flesh and comes alive.96 In the third century, the ElderPhilostratus wrote several Imagines (‘descriptions of images’) which playfullyanimated the sculptural figures he was describing. One of these (2.1) concerneda painting in which a statue of Venus was depicted: Philostratus evokes thepainter’s skill by treating the image of the sculpture as an image of the goddessherself—‘the goddess does not want to seem painted, but she stands outas though one could seize her’. The implication is that colour was the mediumby which the skilled artist could blur the distinction between art andreality.

S C U L P T U R A L P O LY C H R O M Y B E Y O N D T H E C L A S S I C A LThe deployment of colour on sculpture to blur, confuse or collapse the distinctionbetween art and life is by no means the artistic preserve of ancient Greece andRome. The story of ancient polychrome sculpture is one that is embedded inpatterns of sculptural representation in the Mediterranean from Pharaonic Egyptto the Greco-Roman and Byzantine worlds, through Medieval Europe and theRenaissance and Baroque periods, and which continues to perform a significantand polyvalent role in the modern world. In 2008, the J. Paul Getty Museumhosted an exhibition called ‘The Color of Life: Polychromy in Sculpture fromAntiquity to the Present’, which juxtaposed many of the painted classicalreconstructions that had been displayed in exhibitions across Europe andAmerica since 2003 to a wide variety of medieval and modern polychromesculptures. This exhibition demonstrated above all the role of colour in nego-tiating the complex interplay between sculptural art and life.97 Evidence fromEastern art suggests that the use of polychrome sculpture to animate artistic formwas not restricted to the aesthetic discourses of the West: the 8,099 figures of thecelebrated terracotta army buried (c. 210 BCE) with the Chinese emperor Qin ShiHuang, for example, were originally intricately painted to be as lifelike as possibleand carried real weapons, to give the appearance of a real army guarding theemperor’s body.98 In addition, Indian, ancient Near-Eastern and Egyptian sculp-tures are also observed to have been brightly painted, so that ancestors, heroesand gods appeared to participate in the world of the living.99

Polychrome sculpture in the ancient Mediterranean has informed and influ-enced a wide variety of medieval and modern art and architecture, in Europe andbeyond. Even the leading Renaissance sculptors who are credited with estab-lishing an aesthetic of monochrome sculpture sometimes produced polychromepieces: Michelangelo, for example, produced Crucifix (Florence: Santo Spirito,1492–94), a lifelike painted wooden figure of Christ on the cross, Donatelloproduced a number of statues using painted features and gilding to render themmore realistic, and it is known that Bernini’s celebrated marble and travertine



Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi (1648–51) in Piazza Navona had certain features paintedby the artist Guidubaldo Abbatini, although no traces survive today.100 Recentyears have seen a great deal of art-historical interest in Romanesque and Gothiccathedral architecture, and major laser-cleaning projects have led to a radicalreinterpretation of the striking role of sculptural polychromy on cathedrals suchas those at Amiens, Poitiers and Notre-Dame, not only for internal sculpture, butalso on their monumental facades. It has long been observed that wooden andstone sculpture inside medieval European churches was often elaboratelypainted, so that it appeared that the painted figures were staring inwards at thecongregation, in the same way that figures on classical frieze and pedimentalsculpture stared outwards at passers-by.101 Furthermore, the proliferation ofwax museums with their coloured death-masks and life-like figurines sincethe late eighteenth century also emerged out of earlier practice: wax votiveofferings in medieval churches around Europe, wax masks preserving thefeatures of monarchs and nobles, and wax moulage for reproducing the internalorgans of the body in various Renaissance anatomical schools. The idea of paintedrepresentations coming to life, an established theme in classical discourses,has also inspired a number of modern artistic, literary and dramatic stories:reinterpretations of Pygmalion, Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio, and countless novelsand films in the genre of horror bring dummies, wax statues or inanimatefigures to life (both generating and feeding off a range of modern psycho-logical disorders related to the reproduction of the human form). Of course,in each of these contexts, sculptural polychromy performs various complexfunctions, and it would be a mistake to impose on to all of them a single privi-leged interpretation of the role of colour. This said, the ambiguous line betweenfigural art and life, and the critical role of colour in negotiating that line, isembedded in many areas of Western culture. Many of these practices anddiscourses, it can now be convincingly argued, found their inspiration in the artof classical antiquity.

E N V O I : T H E P R I M A P O RTA A U G U S T U S R E V I S I T E DI have argued that colour performed a fundamental role in transforming theappearance and impression of ancient marble sculpture: it made the sculpturemore visible, legible and striking, it finished the marble in such a way as toproduce subtle and sophisticated effects, it transformed the sculpture into arealistic representation of life, and allowed the artist to blur the distinctionbetween art and life. Furthermore, coloured reconstructions of marble sculptureneed no longer be arbitrary or tribute to an art historian’s imagination: recentresearch has allowed us to make serious advances in the study of particular piecesof ancient sculpture. With this in mind, this article will conclude with a ‘test-run’of some of the ideas and principles surrounding sculptural polychromy applied tothe analysis of a single piece of ancient sculpture: the Prima Porta Augustus.With extensive pigments so accurately identified and precisely reconstructed,the art historian cannot and should not look at the Prima Porta Augustus in thesame way again. Colour transforms the statue on artistic, iconographic andpsychological grounds.

The Prima Porta Augustus is a 2.04 m high marble statue of the emperorwhich was discovered in the Villa of Livia at Prima Porta, nine miles outside Rome.



It is an example of exquisite workmanship in Parian marble, a brilliant stoneimported from the Aegean and long valued for its fine grain and translucency.102

Perhaps commissioned in CE 15 after Augustus’ death, the statue is believed to bea marble replica of a bronze original that was voted to Augustus by the Senate in20 BCE and set up in public space at Rome. It appears to show Augustus as avictorious general making a speech, carrying an object (perhaps a spear, now lost)in his left hand and stretching out his right hand in a gesture of adlocutio. Heposes in contrapposto, with his right leg extended forward and his left leg bentand heel slightly raised: the artist has captured him in medias res. His cuirassdepicts various deities, including the emperor’s patron deity Apollo, alongwith the personifications of the territories he has recently conquered: Hispania,Gaul, Germania and – most importantly – Parthia (or the Parthian king PhraatesIV), who is shown returning the stolen standards to a Roman commander(Tiberius, perhaps). At the top of the cuirass, various cosmic deities (normallyidentified as Caelus, Sol and Aurora) illuminate Augustus’ achievements, and atthe bottom Tellus, holding a cornucopia, underwrites the prosperity andresources that the emperor has brought to Rome. At the right heel of the statue, asmall Cupid riding a dolphin parades the genealogical link between the Julianfamily and Venus. The statue displays a series of thinly veiled references toAugustus’ divine qualities (in CE 14 he was officially deified by the state): the barefeet, the larger-than-life frame, the juxtaposition of Cupid, the idealized Apollinefeatures of his face. By merging Classical and Hellenistic heroic qualities withRoman military and political prowess and achievement, the statue celebratesthe emperor’s exceptional role as champion of pax Romana, and at the same timecosmocrat over the civilized world, a figure worthy of being raised to the level ofthe Olympic deities.103

So much for the significance of the Prima Porta’s sculpted detail, which iswell-trodden territory in discussions of Roman art and the Augustan ‘power ofimages’. But what of the colour? Perhaps because of its relatively late discovery in1863, and the conditions in which it was preserved, the Prima Porta Augustusretained many visible traces of colour on its clothing, hair and details of the eyesand the armour.104 In the heyday of nineteenth-century art-historical interest insculptural polychromy, it inspired a number of colourful reconstructions, themost significant being that of Ludwig Fenger in 1886.105 Following a carefulcleaning in 1999 which brought back to light many traces of colour that hadfaded, the Vatican Museums, led by Paolo Liverani, systematically identified anddocumented traces of six or seven across the original artefact, allowing – at leaston a technical level – the most accurate reconstruction yet to be made using aplaster cast (plate 1). How, then, can this reconstruction enrich our interpretationof the original artefact?

There can be no doubt that the painted Prima Porta Augustus was a strikingaddition to Livia’s villa.106 At 2.04 metres it was – just about – larger-than-life,its claim to ‘naturalism’ already provocatively challenged by its godlike stature.But the colours applied to its surfaces carried this ambiguity one step further,simultaneously asserting and denying that the statue was alive: the expensivepigments used (particularly red cinnabar and Egyptian blue) were both fastand loud, making the artefact – like many painted classical statues of heroesand divinities – highly conspicuous, both reproducing the naturalistic colours



of the emperor’s eyes, hair and clothes, and simultaneously transcendingthose colours in an expression of divine perspicuity. The cost and value ofthese pigments were widely acknowledged, and it seems likely that theywere chosen precisely because of their prestige and the honour they assignedto the subject. These bold colours distinguished individual features of the statue;no pigments have been identified on the flesh of the Prima Porta, or on thebackdrop of the cuirass, and it can be supposed that the individual paintedfeatures stood out clearly against this background. Furthermore, a metal roddown the back of the statue, as well as the roughness of carving on the rear,suggests that the statue was displayed against a wall, which itself is likely tohave been painted in such a way as to enhance the distinctive features of thepiece. Divus Augustus, then, was meant to be noticed, still participating inthe world occupied by the viewer but at the same time detached from it by hisgodlike appearance.107

Furthermore, colour finished the statue so that its constituent parts wereexecuted and expressed in the most evocative and sophisticated ways possible.Colour, sometimes in fairly complex mixtures, furnished the Prima PortaAugustus with distinctive eyes, hair, clothes and accessories. And colour providedan additional – and critical – variable for the interpretation of the piece. Thestatue’s hair, which has received a great deal of scholarly attention from thepoint of view of portrait identification and Hellenistic idealization, was coatedwith a reddish-brown pigment, and is perhaps the one feature of the Liveranireconstruction that has been received with the greatest surprise and scepti-cism.108 According to Suetonius, Augustus’ hair was ‘bordering on blond’(subflauus); quite what constituted ‘blond’ in ancient Italy is a matter of somedebate, but it was a distinctive colour for heroes and divinities, particularlyin Augustan literature.109 In particular, it was the colour attributed to Apollo,with whom Augustus had a special connection and who evoked Helios, light,knowledge, truth, purity, the Golden Age, and all those familiar trademarks ofAugustan ideology.110 Furthermore, it is significant that the statue’s hair,and particularly its colour, is not that of an old man; post-mortem, Augustustakes on the appearance of youth and divinity. In a similar vein, the absenceof any dark pigmentation on the emperor’s flesh may suggest that theartist exploited the natural colour of the stone to render the shine and pallorof Augustus’ skin, another feature that traditionally characterized divineappearance.111

Another significant feature of the Prima Porta statue on which extensivetraces of an organic red pigment have been documented is the general’spaludamentum, the scarlet cloak traditionally worn by the imperator on thebattlefield.112 Colour was a defining characteristic of this garment, which(along with the cuirass) signals the emperor’s military and political authority.Furthermore, this pigment, which was combined with a transparent lacquer,would have penetrated the crystalline surface of the translucent Parianmarble (rather than just sitting on it) and may have caused the thin foldsof the paludamentum to glow and catch the viewer’s eye. Traces of Egyptianblue identified on the fringes of Augustus’ tunic most likely represent thepurple murex dye that distinguished Roman political authority: in animage that merged so many different aspects of contemporary public life



and ideology, the juxtaposition of such key schematic Roman colours serves toreinforce the various strands of association and symbolism evoked by thePrima Porta.113 Various pigments identified on the facial hair and garments ofthe Parthian king on Augustus’ cuirass allowed the artist to distinguish thebarbarian’s beard and multicoloured trousers, setting him in sharp culturalcontrast to the smooth-shaven Roman commander who is receiving thestandards. Colour, then, drew attention to the sculpture’s outstanding physicalfeatures. With a nuanced understanding of the cultural importance of blondhair, pale skin or purple garments, then, it allows us to enrich our evaluationand understanding of the work of art. Furthermore, the Prima Porta wasan artefact that did not simply elicit a single privileged interpretation atone point in time: there is evidence that the statue underwent at least onerestoration in antiquity and – with multiple layers of pigment identified on the

fringes of the tunic and on parts of the breastplate – it is likely that it wasalso repainted using different colours, so that its significance as a work of artand as a representation of Rome’s first emperor was organic, subjective andinteractive.114

Finally, in a manner reminiscent of cult statues, colour brought the statueto life, propelling the deceased emperor back into the world of the living.Colour made the statue’s hair hair-coloured, eyes eye-coloured, lips lip-colouredand so on, using a palette that both imitated real life and transcended it bymeans of its vivid colours. For visitors to Livia’s villa, the statue created theimpression that Augustus was watching over them, still participating in theirlives in a way that a monochrome statue would not. Although its statue base, boldcolours and larger-than-life proportions set the figure apart from mortals andmarked it out instantly as a work of art, the idealized, heroicized, triumphantDivus Augustus, with all his features and accoutrements meticulously andappropriately finished off in colour, appeared to onlookers precisely as if he wasreally there.

Notes

This article has developed out of ideas explored in my doctoral thesis ‘Concepts ofcolour in ancient Rome’ (University of Cambridge, 2004) and my book Colour andMeaning in Ancient Rome (Cambridge, forthcoming 2009), and developed in papersdelivered to the Classics Research Workshop at the University of Nottingham inFebruary 2005 and the University of Texas at Austin in February 2007. Manyindividuals have influenced and guided my research in this area: in particular, Iwould like to thank Mary Beard, Vinzenz Brinkmann, Penelope Davies, PaoloLiverani, Robin Osborne and two anonymous Art History readers for their helpfuladvice and suggestions, and Jan Østergaard and Caroline Vout for their generoushelp in refining earlier versions of this article. In addition, I am grateful to theArts and Humanities Research Council for providing the funding that has enabledme to complete this work, and to Maria Pia Malvezzi at the British School at Romefor her invaluable assistance with the images. All translations in this paper aremy own.



1 The Amazon head, discovered during the workof the Herculaneum Conservation Project(British School at Rome/SoprintendenzaArcheologica di Pompeii/Packard HumanitiesInstitute), is now on display in the MuseoNazionale at Naples. The discovery wasreported in The Times (25 March 2006 as ‘Statuereveals Roman lady with her make-up still on’(http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,13509-2102022,00.html, accessed October 2008). Theinitial exhibitions of painted casts were: BunteGotter (Munich Staatliche Antikensammlungund Glyptothek, 2003–2004); I colori del bianco(Vatican Museums, Rome, 2004); ClassiColor(Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen, 2004).Versions of the display have also been exhibitedin Basel, Amsterdam, Istanbul, Athens,Hamburg and Frankfurt, and in America asGods in Color (Arthur M. Sackler Museum, 2007–8) and part of The Color of Life exhibition (J. PaulGetty Museum, 2008). This truly internationalinitiative was the first major exhibition ofsculptural polychromy in over a century. Animportant symposium, ‘Rediscovering color:new perspectives on polychrome sculpture’,was held at the J. Paul Getty Museum at Malibuin May 2008. On the Winckelmann aesthetic,see Antonio Pinelli, ‘Winckelmann e ilproblema del bianco’, Archeo Dossier, 29, 1987,21–4; Miranda Marvin, The language of the Muses:the dialogue between Greek and Roman sculpture,Los Angeles, 2008, c. 6.

2 One significant exception is Brunilde Ridg-way’s essay ‘How: the role of color’ in Prayers inStone: Greek Architectural Sculpture ca. 600–100 B.C.,Berkeley, 1999, 103–42.

3 On the choice, colour and associations ofmarbles for ancient sculpture, see RolfSchneider, Bunte Barbaren, Worms, 1986;Marilda De Nuccio and Lucrezia Ungaro, eds, Imarmi colorati della Roma imperiale (ExhibitionCatalogue), Rome, 2002; Mark Bradley, ‘Colourand marble in early imperial Rome’, Proceedingsof the Cambridge Philological Society, 52, 2002,1–22.

4 On modern techniques for pigment identifica-tion and reconstruction, see esp. VinzenzBrinkmann, ‘Research in the polychromy ofancient sculpture: introduction to the exhibi-tion’, in Vinzenz Brinkmann and RaimundW .unsche, eds, Gods in Color: Painted Sculpture ofClassical Antiquity, Munich, 2007, 20–7. For thepotential of electronic databases, see ValentinaManzelli, La policromia nella statuaria grecaarcaica, Rome, 1994; cf. Ridgway, Prayers in Stone,104–5.

5 Most of the work focuses on the Archaic period,for which the clearest evidence survives: soElena Walter-Karydi, ‘Prinzipien der arch-aischen Farbgebung’, in Karin Braun and A.Furtw.angler, eds, Studien zur klassischen Arch-ologie: Festschrift F. Hiller, Saarbr .ucken, 1986,23–37; Manzelli, La policromia; Brinkmann, Die

Polychromie der archaischen und fr .uhklassischenSkulpturen, Munich, 2003; see also Ridgway,Prayers in Stone, esp. 104–5; 110–14. My forth-coming monograph Colour and Meaning inAncient Rome discusses literary and philoso-phical aspects of colour usage in early imperialRome.

6 For a full nineteenth- and twentieth-centurybibliography on the subject, see Ridgway,Prayers in Stone, 103–7 and Brinkmann,‘Research in the polychromy of ancient sculp-ture’.

7 So Olga Palagia, ed., Greek Sculpture: Function,Materials and Techniques in the Archaic and Clas-sical Periods, Cambridge, 2006, 261 and 275 n.82.

8 Blue pigment was normally used for back-grounds, perhaps (it has been suggested) inimitation of the sky: for examples and discus-sion, see Ridgway, Prayers in Stone, esp. 110–11;Palagia, Greek Sculpture, 275 n. 83; Walter-Karydi, ‘The coloring of the relief backgroundin Archaic and Classical Greek sculpture’, inBrinkmann and W .unsche, Gods in Color, 172–7.

9 Palagia, Greek Sculpture, 261–2 for examples. Seealso Pausanias 10.14.4; 18.7. Further on gilding,see Patrik Reutersw.ard, Studien zur Polychromieder Plastik: Griechenland und Rom, Stockholm,1960, 245–7, who connects the practice inparticular to the Hellenistic ruler cult andassociates it in particular with mid- and late-imperial Roman sculpture; Arnold Lawrence,Greek and Roman Sculpture, London, 1972, 34–5.Brigitte Bourgeois and Philippe Jockey, ‘Ladorure des marbres grecs: nouvelle enquete surla sculpture hellenistique de Delos’, Journal desSavants, 2005, 253–316. For more detail onmetal attachments, see Ridgway, ‘Metalattachments in Greek marble sculpture’, inMarble: Art Historical and Scientific Perspectives onAncient Sculpture, Malibu, 1990.

10 For examples, see also Claude Rolley, La sculp-ture grecque (Vol. 1: Des origines au milieu du Vesiecle), Paris, 1994, 78–81; Palagia, Greek Sculp-ture, 262; on inlaid eyes in bronze statues, seeCarol Mattusch, Classical Bronzes: The ARt andCraft of Greek and Roman Statuary, Ithaca andLondon, 1996, 24 and n. 26 for references. Fromthe principate of Hadrian onwards, the iris,pupil and eyebrows were usually carveddirectly on to the stone, perhaps to provideclearer guidelines for the painter.

11 See n. 3. Cf. also Pliny, Natural History 35.3 onthe practice under Nero, called lapidem pingere,of further embellishing coloured marbles bypainting on additional colours and patterns:on this, see Bradley, Colour and Meaning,Cambridge, 2009, c. 3.

12 So Bernard Ashmole, Architect and Sculptor inClassical Greece, New York, 1972, 60 on thetemple of Zeus at Olympia. Cf. also Rolley, Lasculpture grecque, 82 and Brinkmann, ‘Thefunerary monument of Aristion’, in Brink-



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mann and W .unsche, Gods in Color, 60–5;Ridgway, Prayers in Stone, 113 on the SiphnianTreasury at Delphi.

13 So Lawrence, Greek and Roman Sculpture, 33–4.

14 See Brinkmann, ‘Farbigkeit der Terrakotten’, inFriedrich Hamdorf, ed., Hauch des Prometheus:Meisterwerke in Ton, Munich, 1996, 25–30.

15 On bronze statuary, see Hermann Born, ‘Multi-coloured antique bronze statues’, in Susan LaNiece and Paul Craddock, eds, Metal Plating andPatination: Cultural, Technical and Historical Devel-opments, Oxford, 1993, 19–29; Mattusch, ‘Clas-sical bronzes’, 24–30; id. (2003) in Brinkmannand W .unsche, eds, Bunte Gotter: die Farbigkeitantiker Skulptur, Munich, 2003, 126–31. See alsoSophie Descamps-Lequime, ‘La polychromie desbronzes grecs et romains’ and Marion Muller-Dufeu, ‘Les couleurs du bronze dans les statuesgrecques d’apres les descriptions antiques’, inAgnes Rouveret et al., eds, Couleurs et matieresdans l’antiquite: texts, techniques et pratiques, Paris,2006, 79–102, on ancient artistic mimesisconcerned with variegated bronze statues.

16 For a good summary of classical and post-clas-sical chryselephantine sculpture (includingEgyptian and ancient Near-Eastern ivories), seeKenneth Lapatin, Chryselephantine Statuary in theAncient Mediterranean World, Oxford, 2001, esp.19–20. Cf. Pausanias 7.26.4: on ivory ‘decoratedon the surface with gold and colours’. Cf. alsoCarolyn Connor, The Color of Ivory: Polychromy onByzantine Ivories, Princeton, 1998, esp. c. 3 ‘Theancient tradition of polychrome ivories’.

17 On evidence for the gilding and colouringof wood, see Lapatin, Chryselephantine Statuary,19–20.

18 See Hermann Phelps, Die farbige Architektur beiden Romern und in Mittelalter, Berlin, 1930.

19 The limitations of current knowledge aboutancient sculptural pigments are summarizedwell by Ridgway, Prayers in Stone, 107–8.

20 See Ian Jenkins, ed., Cleaning and Controversy: TheCleaning of the Parthenon Sculptures 1811–1939 (BMOccasional Paper 146), London, 2001; Ridgway,Prayers in Stone, 115–18. For a detailed accountof the tests, see Ian Jenkins and AndrewMiddleton, ‘Paint on the Parthenon sculp-tures’, Annual of the British School at Athens, 83,1988, 183–207.

21 For discussion and references, see Brinkmann,‘Girl or goddess? The riddle of the ‘‘PeplosKore’’ from the Athenian Acropolis’, in Brink-mann and W .unsche, Gods in Color, 44–53.

22 Brinkmann, Die Friese des Siphnierschatzhauses,Munich, 1994; see also Brinkmann ‘Theweighing of the souls: painted names on the‘‘Siphnian Treasury’’’, in Brinkmann andW .unsche, Gods in Color, 54–9.

23 On these and other early discoveries, seeRidgway, Prayers in Stone, 105–6; Brinkmann,‘The prince and the goddess: the rediscoveredcolor on the pediment statues of the Aphaia

Temple’, in Brinkmann and W .unsche, Gods inColor, 70–97. Many of these colour traces fadedrapidly on contact with the air.

24 For details and references, see Palagia, GreekSculpture, esp. n. 82 on further recent evidencefor painted marbles.

25 On this piece as symptomatic of a fourth-century BC development towards a moresophisticated palette and a broader culturalsensitivity to colours in general see Rolley, Lasculpture grecque, 82; Ridgway, Prayers in Stone,122–3; Rouveret, ‘Les yeux pourpres: l’experi-ence de la couleur dans la peinture classiqueentre realite et fiction’, in Rouveret et al.,Couleurs et matieres, 17–28, esp. 17–24; Brecou-laki (2006). Further on this idea, see Brink-mann, ‘The blue eyes of the Persians: thecolored sculpture of the time of Alexander andthe Hellenistic period’, in Brinkmann andW .unsche, Gods in Color, 150–67 and HeinrichPiening, in Brinkmann and W .unsche, Gods inColor, 168–71.

26 The most important study in the twentiethcentury was Reutersw.ard, Studien zur Poly-chromie, esp. 181–242, who argued for signifi-cant continuities between sculptures in theHellenistic East and those in early imperialRome. For an excellent recent summary, seeJan Østergaard, ‘Emerging colors: Romansculptural polychromy revived’, in RobertaPanzanelli, ed., The Color of Life: Polychromy inSculpture from Antiquity to the Present, LosAngeles, 2008, 40–61. On a statue of Trajanwith a star-studded mantle, see Brigitte Freyer-Schauenburg, ‘Der Sternenmantel des KaisersTrajan’, in Brinkmann and W .unsche, BunteGotter, 212–15; on painted decorative featuresin the Aula del Colosso in the Forum ofAugustus, see Lucrecia Ungaro and Maria LuisaVitali, ‘Die bemalte Wandverkleidung der‘‘Aula del Colosso’’ im Augustforum’, in Brink-mann and W .unsche, Bunte Gotter, 216–18.Under raking light, faint traces of paint havebeen detected on the Laocoon sculpture; seeBernard Andreae, Laokoon und die GrundungRoms, Mainz, 1988, esp. plates 13 and 40.

27 For references and discussion, see pp. 34–41.

28 On the Copenhagen Caligula, see Jan Øster-gaard, ‘Caligula in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek,Copenhagen: reconstructing the polychromy ofa Roman portrait’, in Brinkmann andW .unsche, Gods in Color, 178–83; Heike Stege etal., ‘Pigment and binding medium analysis ofthe polychrome treatment of the marble bustof a Roman portrait’, in Brinkmann andW .unsche, Gods in Color, 184–5; Brinkmann etal., ‘The coloration of the Caligula portrait’, inBrinkmann and W .unsche, Gods in Color, 186–91.

29 Most recently, see M. Del Monte et al., Traces ofancient colours on Trajan’s column’, Archaeo-metry, 40: 2, 1998, 403–12.

30 See Dyfri Williams et al., ‘A virtual Parthenonmetope: restoration and colour’, in Brinkmann



and W .unsche, Gods in Color, 112–17. Further-more, Oliver Primavesi (Ludwig-MaximiliansUniversity, Munich) is undertaking a syste-matic project to collect literary resources forpolychrome sculpture.

31 Although one must expect a certain margin oferror in these reconstructions: Brinkmann andW .unsche, Bunte Gotter, figs 158a–b, 177–8, 242and 247 show different reconstructions of thesame sculpture.

32 For resistance to the intense colours of therecent exhibitions, see the responses to MaryBeard’s blog entry ‘Were ancient statuespainted?’ (December 2007) http://timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/2007/12/were-ancient-st.html (accessed November 2008). On develop-ments in sculptural polychromy between theArchaic and the Classical periods see Ridgway,Prayers in Stone, 114; between the Classicaland Hellenistic/Roman periods, Reutersw.ard,Studien zur Polychromie, esp. 181–242.

33 Brinkmann, ‘The coloring of Archaic and earlyClassical sculpture’, in Brinkmann andW .unsche, Gods in Color, 28–43. So also Ridgway,Prayers in Stone, 103–4.

34 See Brinkmann, ‘The prince and the goddess’,in Brinkmann and W .unsche, Gods in Color,70–97.

35 Georg Treu, ‘Die technische Herstellung undBemalung der Giebelgruppen am olympischenZeustempel’, Jahrbuch des kaiserlich DeutschenArchaeologischen Instituts, 10, 1895, 1–35, esp. 25–35; cf. Rolley, La sculpture grecque, 83 on the useof blue–red contrasts here; cf. Ridgway, Prayersin Stone, 114–15.

36 As Ridgway, Prayers in Stone, 117–18. Cf. Rolley,La sculpture grecque, 83 on light and darkmaterials on the Erechtheum. The use of darklimestone for visual contrast in Greek archi-tecture has been explored by Lucy Shoe, ‘Darkstone in Greek architecture’, Hesperia Supple-ments, vol. 8, 1949, 341–482.

37 Lawrence, Greek and Roman Sculpture, 34.Ridgway, Prayers in Stone, 126–7 suggests thatthe use of colours on architectural back-grounds may have been influenced by the stagesets of the ancient theatre.

38 So Ashmole, Architect and Sculptor, 26. This isalso the line adopted by Ridgway, Prayers inStone, 113–14, who argues that colours in theArchaic period ‘are not meant to reflect naturebut to provide contrast and legibility’. Cf.Jeremy Tanner, ‘Nature, culture and the bodyin Classical Greek religious art’, World Archae-ology 33 (‘Archaeology and Aesthetics’), 2001,257–76, esp. 260 on cultural relativism innaturalistic perceptions of the world.

39 One should also consider the type of back-ground against which a statue would beviewed: the painted backdrop of a Pompeianhouse, for example, would make these figuresfar less startling than (for example) the neutralbackground of the Munich Glyptothek. See

Brinkmann and W .unsche, Bunte Gotter, figs. 12,21 vs. 19–20.

40 Virgil, Aeneid 1.586–93.

41 This passage imitates Homer, Odyssey 23.156–63, where Athene imbues Odysseus with divinebeauty, although this simile is restricted to thegilding of silver and there is no mention of theadornment of ivory or marble.

42 Euripides, Helen 262–3. For an excellent inter-pretation of sculptural imagery in this play, seeDeborah Steiner, Images in Mind: Statues inArchaic and Classical Greek Literature and Thought,Princeton, 2002, 54–6, esp. n. 155 where sheexamines the meaning of these lines.

43 On Lucian’s subversion of the traditionalphilosophical doctrines about sight andknowedge, see Isabelle Gassino, ‘Voir et savoir:les difficultes de la connaissance chez Lucien’,in Laurence Villard, ed., Couleurs et vision dansl’antiquite classique, Rouen, 2002, 167–77. I havealso discussed this passage in Bradley, ‘Colourand marble’, 17–18.

44 See Brinkmann, ‘Armor on the naked skin? Theearly Classical ‘‘Cuirass-Torso’’ from the Athe-nian Acropolis’, in Brinkmann and W .unsche,Gods in Color, 100–5 on a Classical torso in theAcropolis Museum at Athens (inv. 599), wherepaint alone distinguishes a muscled cuirassfrom a muscled body.

45 [Virgil], Catalepton 14.9–10. Mille colores markedout its subject matter as divinely imbued: seeBradley, Colour and Meaning, c. 1.

46 Brinkmann, ‘Archaic and early Classical sculp-ture’, in Brinkmann and W .unsche, Gods inColor, 28–43. So also Ridgway, Prayers in Stone,103–4. Theophrastus, De lapidibus and Pliny theElder, Natural History book 35 devote no smallspace to identifying and evaluating theproduction and economy of individualpigments. On shared knowledge and apprecia-tion of marble types among the educatedmetropolitan elite of early imperial Rome, seeBradley, ‘Colour and marble’.

47 For several early modern analogies for suchartistic collaboration, see p. 33. Cf. Palagia,Greek sculpture, 260–1 on rasps, incisions andcontours applied to the stone by the sculptor toassist the work of the painter.

48 Pliny, Natural History 35.133.

49 Plutarch, De Gloria Atheniensium 6.438E (agal-maton egkaustai kai chrusotai kai bapheis).

50 Inscriptiones Italiae 13.2 p. 205, 42, 13; CorpusInscriptionum Latinarum 6.7885 (politor eburarius);6.9462a; 6.9820 6.34374a; 6.37818; 10.6638 C 2,17; cf. Firmicus Maternus 4.14.20.

51 For all references, see the Thesaurus LinguaeLatinae s.v. ‘polior’, ‘politor’, ‘politio’, ‘politus’.Festus P.71M claims that all ancient accom-plishments are called ‘politiones’. For polishedsculpture, see Lucretius, De rerum natura 5.1451;Pliny, Natural History 36.52; 36.54; 36.152;Apuleius, Metamorphoses 4.32.2; Ammianus



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Marcellinus 16.10.8; Prudentius, Contra Symma-chum 1.348; Varro, De re rustica 1.2.10; Cicero, AdQuintum fratrem 3.1.1; Corpus Inscriptionum Lati-narum 1.3025 [Ostia, first century BCE]‘portic(um) poliend(am). . .curauit’; Vitruvius 7.1.4.

52 For the aesthetic transformation of polishedmarbles, see Bradley, ‘Colour and marble’, 5–8,16–18.

53 For example, Brinkmann in Brinkmann andW .unsche, Bunte Gotter, 40. Multiple layers ofcolour have been detected on the stele of Aris-togeiton and on the fringes of the Prima Portastatue. Repainting perhaps also assisted in thereuse of marble spolia for new sculpturalprogrammes, by smoothing over joins andpermitting the expression of new features: e.g.the Hadrianic roundels of the Arch ofConstantine. For evidence of cleaning andtreating, see Inscriptiones Graecae 4.840; Pliny,Natural History 34.99; Pausanias 1.15.4; cf.Plutarch, De Pythiae oraculis 395.2–4.

54 On ‘ganosis’, see Vitruvius 7.9.3–4; Pliny,Natural History 33.122; Plutarch, Natural Ques-tions 287D; Lawrence, Greek and Roman Sculpture,35–6; Manzelli, La policromia, 101–15, 278;Rolley, La sculpture grecque, 82; Palagia, GreekSculpture, 260–1. For a concise survey of thesurface finishing of Greek statues, see AndrewStewart, Greek Sculpture: An Exploration, NewHaven, 1990, 40–2. See also John Pollini et al.,Parian lychnites and the Prima Porta statue: newscientific tests and the symbolic value of themarble’, Journal of Roman Archaeology, 11, 1998,275–84 on the Prima Porta Augustus.

55 Plutarch, Moralia 74E.

56 This passage is discussed in detail in ErnstGombrich, ‘Dark varnishes, variations on atheme from Pliny’, Burlington Magazine, 104,1962, 51–5. Cf. Vitruvius 7.7.1 on sil (a form of‘yellow’ earth), regularly used for the politio ofGreco-Roman sculpture.

57 On the importance of the aesthetics of theunderlying stone even when it was painted, seeBradley, ‘Colour and marble’, esp. 10–11. OnPraxiteles as a pioneer for the use of whitemarble for female nudes, see Boardman, GreekSculpture, 13. See Reutersw.ard, Studien zur Poly-chromie, 242–3 on subtle techniques for sculp-tural skin-toning using wax coatings.

58 I thank Jan Østergaard for drawing my atten-tion to these possibilities. On the encaustictechnique, see Palagia, Greek Sculpture, 261.

59 See Elizabeth Eastlake, The Life of John Gibson,R.A., Sculptor, London, 1870, 212; also on theTinted Venus, see Panzanelli, Color of Life, 164.For other examples of nineteenth-centuryreconstructions, see W .unsche (2004) inBrinkmann and W .unsche, Bunte Gotter, 10–23,esp. figs 4, 7–10.

60 A contrast observed by Peter Stewart, Statues inRoman Society: Representation and Response,Oxford, 2003, 37, and Ridgway, Prayers in Stone,103–4.

61 So John Boardman, Greek Sculpture: The Late

Classical Period and Sculpture in Colonies and

Overseas, London, 1995, 11–12; cf. Stewart,

Statues in Roman Society, 93 on the painting of

statues to imitate life. On the ambiguity of

religious statuary, see Richard Gordon, ‘The

real and the imaginary: production and reli-

gion in the Graeco-Roman world’, Art History, 2,

1979, 5–34, esp. 9–10 on the ambiguity of the

language in which ancient statuary was

described. For zoon see Herodotus 3.88; Plato,

Republic 515a. For spirantia signa see Virgil,

Georgics 3.34; Aeneid 6.847; Arnobius 6.16; cf.

Martial 7.84.2 (spirat et arguta picta tabella manu);

Propertius 2.31.7 on Myron’s statue group:

quattuor artifices, uiuida signa, boues.

62 Ashmole, Architect and Sculptor, 65.

63 Kallistratos, Imagines 2.4.

64 Plato, Republic 4.420C.

65 For references and discussion of colour in

Greek art within a philosophical context, see

Bradley, Colour and Meaning, c. 2. Cf. Rouveret et

al., Couleurs et matieres, for essays exploring

various aspects of colour in artistic ekphrasis.

66 So Ion of Chios (at Ath. 13.603E). Further on

this poetic–artistic distinction, see James (1995)

62–3.

67 Further on this passage, see Rouveret, ‘Les yeux

pourpres’, 23. This idea recurs in Plato at

Republic 2.377E; 586B-C; cf. Cratylus 424E–425B.

68 On this idea, see Philostratus, Imagines 1.2; cf.

Plutarch, Quaestiones conviviales 725C.

69 On the four-colour palette, see Bradley, Colour

and Meaning, c. 2; Charikleia Brecoulaki,

‘Considerations sur les peintres tetra-

chromatistes et les couleurs austeri et floridi’, in

Rouveret et al., Couleurs et matieres, 29–42.

70 See for example Stewart, Statues in Roman

Society, 247. Cf. Reutersw.ard, Studien zur Poly-

chromie, 245–7.

71 So Plutarch, Quaestiones Conviviales 5.1.2 (with

Boardman, Greek Sculpture, 12) on the use of

silvered bronze to express the wasting expres-

sion of a dying Jocasta. The hair of bronze

heads was often darkened with pigments.

72 For discussion and further references, see

Rolley, La sculpture grecque, 80–1.

73 Mattusch, Classical bronzes, 24–30 provides a

good outline of the various effects of bronze

sculpture. Cf. Dio Chrysostom, Orationes 28.3

comparing a boxer’s skin-colour to that of well-

blended bronze. Pliny, Natural History 34.98 on

a bronze alloy mixed with Cypriot copper to

render purple borders on the robes of statues.

Cf. 34.140 on bronze imbued with rusting iron

to create the effect of shame.

74 On models in clay, plaster, wax and wood, see

Palagia, Greek Sculpture, 262–3. Pliny, Natural

History 35.153 discusses the sculptor Lysistratos’

creation of ‘life masks’ in plaster for the

production of bronze portraits. He goes on



(155–6) to describe plaster models used for

Roman statuary.

75 See David Wiles, Masks of Menander: Sign and

Meaning in Greek and Roman Performance,Cambridge, 1991, esp. 74–80, 129–49 on recog-

nized typologies of dramatic masks based onschematic hair and skin colours. On colour-

coding in physiognomy and its relationship totheatre masks, see Bradley, Colour and Meaning,

c. 5.

76 See Rolley, La sculpture grecque, 83 and Ridgway,Prayers in Stone, 285–90 on painted Archaic

fragments in the Persian depot on the Acro-polis; id. (1999) 110 on gendered skin tones on

the Lefkadia Kentauromachy; id. 122 on racialskin tones on the ‘Alexander Sarcophagus’.

77 Walter-Karydi, ‘Prinzipien der archaischenFarbgebung’, esp. 31, 37. Cf. Ridgway, Prayers in

Stone, 125 on early Greek sculpture.

78 Manzelli, La policromia, 33–90.

79 Gordon, ‘The real and the imaginary’, esp. 9–10.

80 This idea of colour as ‘skin’ is explicitly

formulated, for example, at Aristotle, De Sensu439a6–440b25 and in Lucretius’ Epicurean

optics: De rerum natura esp. 4.74–97. The rami-fications this theory holds for broader issues

and cultural differences in colour perceptionare explored in Bradley, Colour and Meaning,

esp. c. 2.

81 Finished statues and classical trompe-l’oeil arediscussed by Stewart, Statues in Roman Society,

36–7 and 148–54.

82 On Roman statues in wall-paintings, seeReutersw.ard, Studien zur Polychromie, esp. 182,

242; Stewart, Statues in Roman Society, 214–21.The most thorough and comprehensive study

remains Eric Moormann, La pittura parietaleromana come fonte di conoscenza per la scultura

antica, Assen/Maastricht, 1988, which catalo-

gued nearly 350 examples of representations ofsculpture in Roman wall-paintings.

83 On colour, garden statues and trompe-l’oeil, see

Reutersw.ard, Studien zur Polychromie, 207, 243.

84 Reviews of Moormann, La pittura parietale haveparticularly focused on this difficult question.

85 This image is discussed in detail by Stewart,Statues in Roman Society, 38–40.

86 Cf. Andreas Gr .uner, Venus ordinis. Der Wandel von

Malerei und Literatur im Zeitalter der romischenB.urgerkriege, Paderborn, 2004, 199, 203–4 on

lifelike caryatids in Augustan paintings,supporting a highly unrealistic entablature.

87 Stewart, Statues in Roman Society, 40; cf. 221.

88 For example, Moormann, La pittura parietale,cat. 217/19 on white pigment used to identify a

silver statue of Aphrodite in the House of theVettii at Pompeii.

89 That said, Vitruvius, De architectura 7.5.3

complains about the disintegration of ‘ratioueritatis’ in contemporary painting. See also

Gr .uner, Venus ordinis, 53.

90 The provocative ambiguity of Greco-Romancult statues has been comprehensivelyexplored by Gordon, ‘The real and theimaginary’; for the relationship betweennaturalism and culture in Archaic and Clas-sical Greek cult statuary, see Tanner, ‘Nature,culture and the body’; on Roman cult statues,see Stewart, Statues in Roman Society, c. 6.; JasElsner, Roman Eyes: Visuality and Subjectivity inArt and Text, Princeton, 2007, 247–51.Reutersw.ard, Studien zur Polychromie, 243 arguesthat cult statues (as distinct from ‘decorative’statues) present the most intense and unam-biguous instances of sculptural polychromy.

91 See Gordon, ‘The real and the imaginary’;Tanner, ‘Nature, culture and the body’, esp.262–3. Cf. Vitruvius 4.5.1; 4.9 on cult statuesgazing back at those who make vows andsacrifice; Pliny, Natural History 36.13 on thestatue of Artemis on Chios, which appeared tovisitors to change its expression; cf. Pausanias8.37.7 (with Elsner, Roman Eyes, 289) on mirrorsoutside temple doors creating ambiguousreflections of cult images.

92 On this image, see Rolley, La sculpture grecque,82. Cf. Mattusch, Classical Bronzes, 24 on an earlyfourth-century BCE vase fragment depicting alife-like bronze cult-statue of Apollo inside aDoric temple, while the real Apollo sits outside.On the representation of statues on vases, seeMonica De Cesare, Statue in immagine: studi sulleraffigurazioni di statue nella pittura vascolare greca,Roma, 1997.

93 See for example the gilded face of MithrasTauroctonos (fig. 7). Further on the radiantglow of cult images (alongside other visual,auditory and olfactory sensations), see Gordon,‘The real and the imaginary’, 13; Tanner,‘Nature, culture and the body’, 262. Tannerargues that the detached and unnaturalisticappearance of Archaic Athenian cult statuary(e.g. Archaic korai) ‘served primarily the statusinterests of an aristocratic elite’ and that thisgave way to the naturalism of Classical statuaryas an artistic expression of the openness,interaction and accessibility that was conco-mitant with democratic culture; it would notbe difficult to insert shifts in the naturalism ofsculptural polychromy into this argument(although Tanner does not attempt to do so).

94 So Elsner, ‘Cult and sculpture: sacrifice in theAra Pacis Augustae’, Journal of Roman Studies, 81,1991, 50–61., esp. 51 on the necessity for‘additional, creative and subversive interpreta-tions which images evoke in different viewersand at different times’. That meaning is alwaysrealized at the point of reception is also theline adopted by Marvin, The Language of theMuses, esp. c. 9 ‘Roman ideal sculpture’.

95 On Hephaestus, see Homer, Iliad 18.373–9,417–21. On Daedalus, Marion Muller-Dufeu, ed.,La sculpture grecque: sources litteraires et epigra-phiques, Paris, 2002, nos 80–150.



96 This story is memorably described at Ovid,Metamorphoses 10.243–97, where the poet play-fully toys with the materiality of the statue andits strikingly lifelike appearance. Cf. Pliny,Natural History 36.21 on Praxiteles’ cult statueof Aphrodite of Knidos. Further on ‘agalmato-philia’, see Steiner, Images in Mind, 185–250;Stewart, Statues in Roman Society, esp. 264–7.

97 For the exhibition catalogue, see Panzanelli,Color of Life.

98 Jane Portal et al., eds, The First Emperor: China’sTerracotta Army, London, 2007, esp. 172–4.

99 See for example Om P. Agrawal, ‘A study ofIndian polychrome wooden sculpture’, Studiesin Conservation, 16, 1971, 56–68. The iconic bustof Nefertiti now in the Egyptian Museum atBerlin is one striking example of artisticmimesis in Pharaonic sculpture. For generaldiscussion, see Donald Wilber, ‘The role ofcolor in architecture’, The Journal of the AmericanSociety of Architectural Historians, 2, 1942, 17–22.One might also compare ancient Mayanpainted stucco sculptures and ceramics.

100 Donatello’s ‘St John the Baptist’ (1438) and‘Mary Magdalen’ (c. 1455), for example, bothemploy elaborate paint and gilding on awooden base. Cf. also Claus Sluter’s ‘Well ofMoses’ (1396–1406) at Champmol, painted byJean Malouel (court painter to the Burgundiandukes) and gilded by Hermann of Cologne – seeS. Nash, ‘Claus Sluter’s ‘‘Well of Moses’’ for theChartreuse de Champmol Reconsidered’(published as three parts in The BurlingtonMagazine, 2005, 2006 and 2008); Gregor Erhart’s‘Vanitas’ group (c. 1500), painted by HansHolbein the Elder. Further, see Ned Denny, ed.,Wonder: Painted Sculpture from Medieval England,Leeds, 2002. For an example of painted baroquesculpture, see El Greco (c. 1600) Epimetheus andPandora, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid (E-483 and E-937). For a discussion of many of theabove pieces, see Panzanelli, Color of Life.

101 Cf. also the Globe Theatre in London, whichwas also elaborately painted in Shakespeare’sday.

102 Its marble-type, however, had confusedarchaeologists for centuries; see Pollini, ‘Parianlychnites’. On the importance of Parian marble,see Bradley, ‘Colour and marble’, 10–11.

103 For a classic analysis of the Prima Porta, seePaul Zanker, The Power of Images in the Age ofAugustus, Ann Arbor, 1988, 188–92; cf. Kleiner,Roman Sculpture, London, 1992, 61–9; KarlGalinsky, Augustan Culture, Princeton, 1996, esp.155–64. On the date, see Valentin M .uller, ‘Thedate of the Augustus from Prima Porta’, Amer-ican Journal of Philology, 62, 1941, 496–9.

104 See Ulrico Kohler, ‘Statua di Cesare Augusto’,Annali dell’Instituto, 35, 1863, 432–49, who rele-gates discussion of colour traces to a footnote(p. 434 n. 1); cf. Guglielmo Henzen, ‘Scavi diPrima porta (2)’, Bulletino dell’Instituto di Corris-pondenza di Archeologia, 4, 1863, 71–8, who

mentions colour only in passing; cf. Walter

Amelung, Die Sculpturen des Vaticanischen

Museum, Berlin, 1903, 19–20; Reutersw.ard,Studien zur Polychromie, 212–16, 244; Paolo

Liverani, ‘L’Augusto di Prima Porta’, in AnnaGramiccia, ed., I colori del bianco, Rome, 2004,

235–42.

105 See Brinkmann and W .unsche, Bunte Gotter, 24,

fig. 22.

106 Unfortunately, its precise location within thevilla is not known. A base discovered near the

atrium wall may have served as a suitablestatue base: see Allan Klyne and Peter Liljen-

stolpe, ‘Where to put Augustus? A note on theplacement of the Prima Porta statue’, American

Journal of Philology, 121, 2000, 121–8.

107 Tanner’s argument (‘Nature, culture and the

body’, 265) that detached sculptural form inArchaic cult statuary alluded to a ‘commit-

ment to an elite self-identity as theoeides,godlike, while engendering a feeling of awe

and deference towards the aristocratic elite on

the part of the demos’ might also be applied tothe ‘super-human’ appearance of the Prima

Porta Augustus (and similar Roman statuary),although the politics of viewing are likely to

have been very different.

108 The pigments may originally have been

subdued by other colours or finishes, butevidence has disappeared. It is possible that the

red pigmentation may have been a base forgilding, which was not uncommon on divine

and heroic statuary. On the various possibi-lities of red imprints on marble surfaces, see

Ridgway, Prayers in Stone, 107.

109 Suetonius, Augustus 79. On blond hair on

Augustan heroes and divinities, see Ovid,Amores 1.15–35 (Apollo); Metamorphoses 6.118

(Minerva); Virgil, Aeneid 4.559 (Mercury). Cf.Rolley, La sculpture grecque, 82 on representa-

tions of yellow-haired statues on vases. Someaspects of the importance of colour on sculp-

tural hair (esp. gilding) are discussed by Caro-

line Vout, ‘What’s in a beard? RethinkingHadrian’s Hellenism’, in Simon Goldhill and

Robin Osborne, eds, Rethinking Revolutionsthrough Ancient Greece, Cambridge, 2006, 96–123,

esp. 115–17.

110 A literary analogue to the figural scene on thePrima Porta cuirass is Horace’s Carmen Saecu-

lare, which is particularly concerned with light

imagery (see Pollini et al., ‘Parian lychnites’,283).

111 A phosphoprotein treatment identified across

the surface of the marble, as well as actingas a preservative, is likely to have softened

unpainted parts of the statue. On candor as a

characteristic feature of the divine in Augustanliterature, see Virgil, Aeneid 8.608; [Tibullus]

3.6.1; Ovid, Fasti 3.772. On the ‘divineglow’ characteristic of classical cult imagery,

see n. 94.



112 On the distinctive colour of the paludamentum,dyed with cochineal (a scarlet pigment derivedfrom crushed insects), see Pliny, Natural History22.3; Silius Italicus 17.396.

113 See esp. Meyer Reinhold, The History of Purple asa Status Symbol in Antiquity, Brussels, 1976. Cf.also Bradley, Colour and Meaning, c. 7. Tests inthe laboratories of the Vatican Museums from1999 to 2002 detected evidence of a milk-basedbinder applied to the pigments of the statue,

which would have been particularly importantfor binding the delicate blue pigment. Thisbinder is also likely to have had a significantvisual effect on the appearance of the colours(see p. 438).

114 For details of the multiple pigment layers, seeLiverani, ‘L’Augusto di Prima Porta’, 239, wherehe suggests that the yellow pigment super-imposed on to the Egyptian blue of the tunicfringes is likely to be late-antique.



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Colour on Ancient Marble Sculpture